1. Last Friday I went to a performance of "As I Like It", a one-act play written by Amanda based on her colorful and oh-so-complicated life.

Imagine a McQueen-clad Marilyn crossed with an R-rated Nancy Mitford. That's the quickest way I know of describing her.

Here's the more conventional way: Photographer, poet, neon artist, US fashion editor for Genlux Magazine and full-blown eccentric, Amanda never lets anything as insignificant as fear stop her. I've known her for over fifteen years and she never stops surprising me or making me howl with laughter.

"As I Like It" is a whirlwind monologue that takes you on a journey of her life so far, from the hardships of a vulnerable childhood and Dickensian boarding school to her stint with the Moscow Theater Company to being a married London socialite and a Parisian mistress. Performed by actress Elizabeth Karr and punctuated with operatic duets from Lisa Zane and Amanda's son, Charles, it's a gutsy way of approaching love and loss -- with zero apologies and lashings of trenchant wit.

Ah yes, the old dame is back. Domineering, intractable and fiercely opinionated, she's part peacock, part snapping turtle and we love her for it. I can't remember a time when a character on television has been so over-the-top entertaining, can you?

Whether she's grumbling about fact vs. fiction ("The truth is neither here nor there, it's the look that matters") or reprimanding her granddaughter for wanting to learn to drive ("You are a lady, not Toad of Toad Hall"), we somehow find ourselves firmly on her side.

And those expressions.

Watch carefully.

If you spot pursed lips, eyeballs threatening to jump ship from their sockets or that massive walking stick of hers hitting the floor like a thunderbolt, DUCK AND ROLL.

She's getting ready to unleash a corker.

3. Violet Trefusis

Famous quotes:

"Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity's sake be it to the top of your bent."

I just finished reading Michael Holroyd's "The Book of Secrets" and its spell upon me lingers.

Part biography, part memoir, the book is about the author's fascination with the various English enchantresses who shadowed and inhabited the palatial Villa Cimbrone in Ravello, Italy.

There was Violet Trefusis -- daughter of Alice Keppel (and perhaps King Edward VI) -- whose love affair with Vita Sackville-West wreaked havoc on her entire life and turned her into a latter-day Miss Havisham. There was Eve Fairfax, purported mistress of Rodin and possessor of an enormous scrapbook of her private life that she carried everywhere with her.

And there are two modern-day women Holroyd encounters, each with a personal connection to the Villa Cimbrone, and whose stories are seamlessly woven in with the others to reveal a patchwork of secret longings and uncelebrated achievements.

38 comments:

It is an endless list... and I adore another iconic English woman, Beryl Markham: fearless and adventurous, glamorous with a dry self deprecation, didn't give a fig about rules, loved animals with a fierce loyalty and men with a casual nonchalance, wore a tiara and aviator's goggles with equal ease... What a pilot, what a jockey, what a writer! ( I'm half English and so have decided views on the subject.)What a great subject Lisa, we need more spotlight on fabulous women!

The picture of "The Dowager" is worth a mint. Wish I had gotten in on Downton Abbey last year; hard to come in mid-stream as there are so many characters to keep up with. Just finished reading Portrait of a Marriage. I found the affair of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West an exhausting read. They burned the candle at both ends for quite a long time.

I've just finished Diana Athill"s memoir "Instead of a Letter". She's rather the opposite a maddening bird of paradise, thus not on point with the post's topic, though she is English. It's searingly well written. Highly recommended.

There is something so captivating about the dry wit of English women. I was just telling my husband when we were watching DA on Sunday night to remind me to practice some of the "Countess of Granthem's" expressions and sayings now so I can use them often when I am older!

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Lovely post :) I adore the fact that you have Maggie Smith and Violet Trefusis in the same post. (Have you read Trefusis' novella Echo? It's great! Although, since it was written in French, I hadn't realised she was English.) (I read it in English, obviously!)

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